Karma Socialization

The following is a rambling exploration into how children might develop ethical guidelines and relationships with other people.

Variability of the number of a child’s older/younger siblings and the presence of a traditional masculine archetype in the home greatly affects that child’s understanding of social dynamics. Before the age of 4, a child undergoes a re-orientation where it becomes aware that other people share a consciousness analogous to their own, c.f. John Stewart Mill’s Problem of Other Minds. This is a tremendous shift in consciousness, and I posit that the relative success of this socialization greatly affects the child’s ability to empathize with others as an adult.

A child experiences several of these shifts throughout its lifetime. One key observation of these shifts is that they are not, as popularly imagined, discrete and separate. In fact, they share an exponential relationship. Each shift requires a critical mass of information and the brain development to support the complexities that the new outlook requires, each shift requiring exponentially more of each. A result of the exponential nature of a shift is that the new outlook subsumes the previous one. Its not an alternate of equal importance to the previous outlook, nor does it completely eliminate the previous outlook. Rather, the previous outlook serves as a foundation for the new outlook. In this way, a hierarchy exists but, at the same time, each outlook is of equal importance. Foundational problems propagate throughout the hierarchy, in the same way that a lack of understanding the fundamentals of arithmetic cause all kinds of problems if you are trying to do calculus problems. No amount of examination of the priciples of calculus sheds any light into the reason that your computations yield incorrect results.